Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board
by Lilith Encodead
Summary: "I want to pick the pieces up, A broken child, A broken cup." Rook and Natasha c. five years before the events of Series 5


**[Summary] **_**"I want to pick the pieces up/ A broken child/ A broken cup."**_** Rook and Natasha c. five years before the events of Series 5 (A/N Assuming that Natasha is 20-21 at this time, as she looked the same age as Tom to me.) **

* * *

"_I was gonna do that. Take care of the… Take care of her."_

"_That's my job. For tonight at least."_

* * *

Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board

Foster home number three, and she was starting to grow jaded. Natasha had wondered whether it was her or them that were to blame for it 'not working out.' 'It' being the situation and 'working out' meaning satisfying them. The first time she had thought it was them; they were nervous and she was wary. How can you bond with a person if there are no words between you? So Rook had told her to be more amenable - but she hadn't known what that meant, so he gave her a strained "Chatty, Natasha; outgoing. People will learn to like you if you could only communicate." And so she did communicate. She found it came easily to her in the second house. She may not have trusted them, watching the mirror every time they walked past it, checking that their reflection was not absent without leave. But she could talk to them. No, she may not have trusted them, yet, or cared for them, but at least they tried to make her feel a part of something.

But that had turned bad as soon as she started remembering. Like something resurfacing from murky waters, it formed silent and slow in her mind. The nights and nights in the darkness came back to her. She remembered sleeping through the daytime hours, measured only by the gleam of the fissures in the curved walls and the ceiling of the tunnel stretching above her head like a ballerina's arms. She remembered people talking in hushed, insistent voices standing above her, and not being allowed to look in some places; the sound of the trains and the motorway in a constant and ambivalent _hum, hum, humm_, rumbling down the walls as if she were trapped inside a stomach, reminding her that the rest of the world was so close, but couldn't see her, and didn't care. And her mother leaving with them, not looking back at her as she heard the word _"Mum," _break past her long-mute lips as if she hadn't have said it at all - like a puncture wound that doesn't bleed. And she remembered him coming too long afterwards with his men. Their torchlights melting over the curved walls, fidgeting on their course like Tinkerbelle at the pantomime, as an unfamiliar voice followed them.

With sour stings somewhere between her stomach and her chest, Natasha remembered not knowing what to do, and therefore doing nothing. Pressing one side of her face into the mattress and hearing the springs yield in almost musical pangs. Closing her eyes tight, playing dead. Curling inwards, legs tight to her stomach. Playing dead. Until they circled her and stared at her like she was an animal. And then Rook - fucking hell, it had been him all along, how could she forget? - had stretched a plastic glove over his hand and she had wondered whether she was dirty.

_Is that what I am now? _

_Dirty?_

_That's why they don't want me._

The night she remembered everything was the night she ruined herself for the human word. Laying raw and awake all night. All she had done - all she could do - was stare and think as the memories rushed through her, as if her heart was beating them around her body - beating out the unnamed unease of doubt and fear, of years, and years, filling in the dark empty spaces of her life. With eyes open wide, she burnt the memories into the walls and the ceiling around her. She had ruined this room, this house, this family, because they would not understand. They wouldn't even believe her.

They could not give her answers. How can such kind people be so useless? So stupid. So fucking stupid. How could she not have known?

How could he not tell her?

Over the coming months irritation and impatience had crumbled and filtered through her second foster family, and they grew to dislike her. On the paperwork they had called her 'boisterous and unreasonable.' The words had slid off of her back; bounced off of her, even. She didn't care and wouldn't care what people thought of her, until she heard their words come out of his mouth, slow and measured, with a deepening but restrained disappointment;

"Boisterous and unreasonable…"

The third home wasn't even worth mentioning. She hadn't wanted them - she hadn't wanted anyone and she had made that known like a parrot with only so many words until, in the end, they didn't want her either. It was her fault things didn't work out.

She was in the back of his car, again. There was no one in the front passenger seat, but he had put her in the back. Perhaps it was easier to keep a subtle eye on her that way? His eyes flickering in and out of the overhead mirror like light on mirrored wind-chimes, his expression unreadable. Or perhaps he wanted her to feel bad, excluded? Like a criminal in a police car.

"You have no idea how difficult it was to find you a home after the first two, 'Tasha..."

Natasha held her silence, lips tightening as she looked vacantly to the sky.

"What was so bad about them this time, hm?"

"She was an old bag and he smelt like an outhouse." she replied lazily "Why did they even want a kid, anyway?"

"Because I gave you a glowing reference and they were rather keen on you-"

"-Until they met me-"

"-I needn't have bothered."

"Why did you?"

He was silent now. Her smugness soothed her bad temper, even if she didn't indulge it.

"You need someone to look after you."

"I don't need looking after."

"You may say that now, but until you're eighteen you need someone to take care of-"

"-Take care of me?"

"Yes."

"Like a problem-?"

"-Natasha-"

"-Then I'm a problem?"

He wetted his lips but before he could inhale to defuse her bad humour she cut him down;

"That's it, isn't it? I'm just another problem. Another person to keep quiet and happy."

He shot a look into the overhead mirror that tutted on impact "This is most unlike you, 'Tasha."

"You don't know me." She mumbled as _Any more than I know you _rolled silently through her mind. She didn't say it. That would imply that she gave a shit. But he was silent again and that was odd. The silence was heavy, and the smell of the car started to warm her lungs, and she wanted to throw up. She didn't see him often, but he knew how to make her feel bad. None of her foster homes had cared enough to make her feel guilty.

"Where are you taking me?"

Rook paused, as if in reluctance or displeasure "Recent events mean that Social Services are unable to process your claim until tomorrow - you're a 'low priority,' given your age. And, as you refuse to stay with that poor couple and they refuse to have you, the safest option is for you to stay with your next of kin, until a more suitable situation can be found."

"Who's my next of kin?" she asked, politer now.

He didn't mean to stall as long as he did.

But he did.

"I am."

* * *

His home was nothing like she had pictured it because she had never pictured it. The fact that he had a life outside of his work at all was near incomprehensible - if you could call it that. A life.

The flat was bare and draughty, as though no one lived there. No, she thought, if no one lived here, there would be dust. There'd be something…But there was nothing. Like walking into a void of space; there were no family photos, no smells, no dents in the settee, nothing set down out of symmetry, just nothing - it made her feel untidy and out of place, like a blemish on clean white skin. It made her quiet and she hated being quiet, so she spread her dulled memories over her tongue;

"I've been here before." Natasha broke the wake-like silence as they walked into the kitchen. She hadn't expected him to answer, but when he did - busying his hands making tea, not looking at her - his tone was reminiscent, almost warm.

"Yes, when you were very little."

Natasha sat at the table. When she spoke her voice sounded too loud and too husky for the quite house; "The night you found me?"

"Yes"

"I wasn't that 'little.'" Nothing. He said nothing. He didn't even look round. "Seven isn't that..."

She didn't finish, sucking her lip and feeling the silence hang like bait, hoping he'd tell her something else she'd forgotten. But he didn't.

"Still," he set the tea down in front of her "I don't suppose you remember any of it." It wasn't a question and he didn't sit down. She looked into him, not bothering to shovel heaped spoons of sugar into her tea (as was her custom), just stared at him, her brow involuntarily creasing: "I remember."

Rook's features slid into a concerned frown.

"I remember…" her voice deepened as she repeated it, shaking now, as if she were angry - no, she _was_ angry. After everything that had happened, how could he expect her to forget? Want her to forget? "What? You think because I've never said anything, that means it didn't happen? It didn't just fade away. It didn't just disappear. It happened to me." her voice grew firmer and he watched; watched and received in a passive, meditative observation, his ice-eyes betraying nothing as they hung near luminous above her (to which she could bring no comparison) ever-present yet fleeting through the memories of her childhood like the lunar cycles.

"I was there for weeks…"

"We got there as fast as we could." he replied calmly, not rushing a syllable "We didn't expect there'd be any survivors."

"I saw four people die - and you told me not to look."

Rook hopelessly searched for something to say; a justification, or an apology, but both fell flat and hollow. The truth? - what would be the point if she remembered everything, anyway? - so he chose a platitude-like lie: "We did all we could. There was no one else who could have helped you, no one else who comprehends these creatures. We couldn't have got there sooner -"

"-but you told me not to look-!"

"You were, and still are a child. How could I have allowed you too see such horrors?"

"But I already had! I'd been down there for weeks and you told me not to look… like that would change something - like I would just forget, like I wouldn't have seen them - you…!" Natasha couldn't look at him. The most important thing in her entire life and she wasn't even meant to remember it. If he had his way, she wouldn't even know about it.

Her fingers felt cold as a small, guilty realisation broke over her, like a fine droplet that ripples out in expanding and ongoing 'Os.' If he had it his way, she thought, it would never have happened: she'd never have spent those weeks in the dark, or heard her mother scream out her last breaths, or had the film peeled from her eyes before she was old enough to understand.

"You saved me." she said, quieter now, appealing to him "But you wouldn't put me right again. You never fixed me."

"_You never fixed me."_

The kitchen fell away from Rook's mind as it swelled and unfurled outwards, falling heavy on him like a net unburdened. The night his department had raided the tunnel blood-bank they had lost two men - ripped to pieces in minutes like soft meat in piranha waters. Headquarters was in a state of disorder and upheaval. There was nowhere to put a child. Even their reception area was built to intimidate and they couldn't very well leave her there. As he hovered in corridors and strained indecision, the young Natasha had quickly become Mr Rook's shadow, keeping as close to him as possible, intensely conscious not to touch him. They could hardly put her in one of the holding cells, although the proposal had crossed the mind of many of his men, like a mesh, it stitched them together as they closed in on him: "Lock the vampire child away. She's not so young and doesn't look prone to forgetting."

Seven is not so young and he had known that. But as she drew closer to his knees, her silence had made him ache at his core in a small, subtle pang. He knew very little of children, and she seemed to contradict all of that. Her eyes didn't leave him. Her small mouth didn't open. Not once. Trauma, he had thought. Not shock; she'd been down there too long. Delayed shock? There hadn't yet been a delay.

They didn't have a protocol for children, so they treated her like an adult. They had a tiled room in which two men in plastic overalls would hose down any collected, live witnesses with cold water and disinfectant. This often made cover stories of a "severe bio-hazard" more believable. It was a detached and clinical process. It detached the event from the witness, and the witness from the department. They were not Social Services. This was Rook's case and his responsibility. He would oversee everything to ensure it was done properly. Within guidelines.

But there were no guidelines for children.

Much like modern operating theatres, there was a viewing window for training purposes into the room from which Rook watched her come in, filthy and fully clothed. Her hair held its shape due to grease as her dark eyes sparkled with an internalised panic which - he thought - made her look animalistic.

His men gestured to the centre of the room and she nervously took her place there. The window through which Rook was observing was a two-way mirror - he knew this and his men knew this, but she did not. Natasha stared into it unwaveringly as his mind bounced back and forth; _she can't see me, she's looking at me, she can't see me… _One of his men straitened her and systematically unzipped her coat and cast it aside, the plastic buttons and zips clattering as they hit the floor; pulling her jumper over her shoulders, casting it aside; trousers and underwear both at once, cast aside after she stepped backwards from them, eyes cast down as if she'd never seen her own body before.

His men tested the hoses on the tiled floor first. The water sloshed and foamed lazily eddying about her heels, foam rising and dully swaying in swollen clots from which her legs rose, pale and bruised, slim but shaped into tight bud-like calves and slimmer thighs enclosing a near-white, tidy slit pointing downwards like an arrow from her bone-tight stomach, her navel like a full stop at the centre. Her chest was flat and sexless, her shoulders boyish. As she looked down the faint shadows on her collarbones shifted as the bones poked up through her skin, pale and delicate as unearthed roots, curiosity billowing from her in waves. But caution kept her still as the water slipped between her toes.

Rook's mouth had gone dry. _She's a child. A little girl for God's sake. _And her eyes were on him through the two-way mirror, wide and frightened - just as they had been in the tunnel, her small face reflected in the pocket mirror.

"_Human."_

Her mouth drawn mute.

There was a roar from the hose as the water hit her. Cold, full and white it rose up in arches and came down like whips to cover her full height as she crumbled in on herself, screams bouncing back to her from the walls. It rumbled in the pipes around them, above his head, as his men fought to keep their wrists clenched and unquaking on the shaking nozzles, shouting directions at each other over the water, and over her voice. You'd think they were hurting her, he thought, as the hoses choked. A sickening noise. Her fingers clutched at her scalp, head bent downwards, screaming into her chest. A tight fleshy knot at the centre of the room. She had been white but now she glowed red. And still his men kept shouting to one another, dripping, water still attempting to shake their wrists from their arms.

"That's enough." Rook heard himself say, mouth to the microphone, finger pressed to the button.

She had stopped screaming, but the water continued roaring thick and fast. He would have to be firmer.

"I said that's enough."

Dazed, his men turned off the water and pulled down their hoods, red-cheeked and panting excuses as Rook stepped carefully through the puddles, rippling the strip-lights on the ground. Natasha didn't move as he gingerly wrapped a towel around her shoulders.

"That's not my job." he replied at long last, eyes misted and distant as he drew himself out from the memory.

"Neither is finding me a foster home."

"You need someone to take care of you."

"_Then why don't you do it?" _her whole mind cried - embarrassing her - her mouth frozen in a half-sneer. Why couldn't he do it? What would be so difficult about having her in a spare room? What was so wrong with him that he couldn't touch her in the tunnel without gloves on? She had a reflection. What was so wrong with him that he couldn't touch her?

"I can take care of myself." she insisted, knowing that he would counter her in some way but pleading all the same "I can. If you give me a job, I'll show you what I can do."

"I can't."

"You won't." her chair squeaked and he involuntarily grimaced long enough for her to move past him.

"'Tasha, enough of this." he attempted "You're only here for tonight; please don't make it a bitter visit."

"I'm going to bed." there was no arguing with her as the shadows of the corridor curtained her off. He would not peer after her.

* * *

As the road rushed beneath his eyelevel Rook felt his consciousness beginning to slip. He shouldn't really be driving but the work van had only made her panic, wide eyed like an owl with its wigs crushed to its sides. This night felt as though it would never end, but he supposed it felt longer for her, watching her fall away into sleep within minutes of sitting in his car, the way younger children do. Three minutes and thirty-four seconds, to be precise. But time drags on for children, he thought. The world of adults seems so intense through their eyes, it hurts them not to be a part of it.

He remembered it well. Better than he would like to admit.

Him and his men had not voted on it. He would not leave her in the cells, nor would he allow it. There was no discussion to be had. Their cells were for monsters and she was no monster. That night, she would stay with him whilst his men combed through the directory for any relatives of a Natasha Miles. If she had none, they would contact the relevant authorities.

They were in the business of monsters, not children.

Rook had put her in the back of his car, with a coarse tartan blanket warped about her shoulders that swallowed her in the dim. His eyes flashed in and out of the overhead mirror, watching, but she didn't move. Not once. Like a boneless doll carelessly tossed to the back seat. The night rolled past and she held the quilt closed with a loosening hand, gently shaking from side to side with the motion of the car, knuckles appearing and reappearing with the passing of streetlights. The shadows flitted over her face, making her disappear for seconds at a time. It was a relief for her eyes to be closed and un-watching.

They arrived outside his flat at an ungodly morning hour - but the night was still with them and she was still asleep, he assured himself. Opening the car door as quietly as he could, he put his arms underneath her legs and around her back. Lifting her was no effort at all. With a small ringing - the same pang - in his chest he observed that she weighed next to nothing, as if she could just rise up from his arms, like dust in a sunbeam. Her breath was gentle. Her eyelids were rough and purple from lack of sleep, stemming delicate eyelashes cast down over her pallid cheeks. She didn't look at all well. No sooner had he set her down on his bed did she start to stir. Little sparks of frustration and something like panic crackled through Rook's skin, as Natasha grumbled small noises of displeasure, kicking her feet under the quilts, head tossing from side to side, eyes not yet open.

"_Go to sleep. Go to sleep…" _looped and looped around his mind, its syllables tapped out on the roof of his mouth, silent. But she kicked and moaned until she sat up, head bowed, rubbing her eyes indelicately with the back of her wrist. She blinked up at him standing by the door, light spilling in from the hall behind him and stretching his shadow towards her. He already had his hand on the doorknob, but as he moved to close it she pulled the corner of the duvet away, uncovering one half of the bed as she scooched to one side.

"No." he said, almost irritated. But she smiled at him and his words fumbled in his mouth, too warn and too rusty for someone so small and sweet. "Only you sleep here tonight."

They shared a glance. Her little white face framed by the shadows of the room only smiled at him, unsettlingly yet endearingly wordless. She didn't understand. He could tell. She didn't understand. Or she didn't want to. Or she expected him to change his mind for her.

"Just you."

Rook closed the door. It clicked. He stood with his back to the door and cast his tired eyes to the ceiling, listening…

The fridge hummed down the hall and the light-bulbs buzzed subtly, as if to hiss-whisper: _"Why? Why are you still awake?" _He listened. She wasn't asleep. He knew she wasn't asleep. He'd just watched her wake up. She wasn't asleep.

Could she sense that he was still there…?

He should move. Sleep on the sofa. Take his hand from the doorknob and go to sleep. Let his mind unravel in his dreams. _"Go to sleep. Go to sleep…" _

But he heard his bed creek and the floorboards yield a little. The thud of heels. Thud. Thud. Thud. Rook poised himself, one hand in a firm fist on the doorknob. But it didn't turn. She only knocked on the door. A small, shy sound. But incessant. Rook bowed his head, smoothing out the furrows of his brow with cold fingertips, whispering a _'no' _for each knock she gave.

No.

No.

No.

A pause stretched, expanded and ceased. Unable to ignore her any longer, Rook opened the door and she fell back on her own legs, pouting guiltily, rooted to her spot on the floor, spine to the wood of the bed, watching him as if he were about to hit her. That look. It made the same dull, unfamiliar note ring out through his chest, again. Rook checked his movements. Kept himself cautious. Kept himself gentle. What if she'd learnt to bite down there, in the dark…?

He looked silently from her to the bed. She watched. She followed his eyes. He made the gesture again. _"You - there."_

Natasha's small mouth shrunk even more - disappointment, was that what he was?

No. It was displeasure.

Slowly, with a dragging reluctance she slunk back under the covers, her head still bowed in a half-sulk. Before he could turn to leave she tugged at the folded corner of the quilt again, opening the other side wider.

It was late.

It was late. He would play her little game if it got her to sleep.

Rook sat on he edge of the bed and removed his shoes, her eyes impressing on his arching shoulder blades. He lined them straight, toes and heels in-keeping with the floorboards. Fully clothed in every layer of his suit, he lay rigid on one side of the bed atop the covers, with his arms at his sides and eyes open to the ceiling, like a child playing Stiff As A Board. She turned over, bunching the covers over her head to not-so-secretly watch him, like a spying little creature imagined by a chid; chin to her chest and eyes shining. The shadows added definition to the bags carved beneath her eyes, and he wished he could scrub them away. It was late.

She didn't last long. Perhaps twenty minutes. To her credit, he had felt himself drift a little a few minutes in. But - despite her best efforts - she slept like a firefly extinguished.

For the remainder of the night Rook wondered the rooms of his flat in circuits, systematic and unceasing like the course of the minute-hand around the watch face (always finding his way back to the bottle of scotch, its neck kept warm by his hands). Hours of empty clock-watching passed before the sun split the night from the ground. Meaningless words dogged him, insistent and unclear, dragging memories along with them to muddy his thoughts even further.

But it was too late to fix things now. All was unclear. Nothing was right, nothing was solid. Sleep was playing hide and seek now as it had done ten years previously. He would have to contact Social Services tomorrow.

* * *

**[A/N] Thanks for reading. Xx**

**The quote in the summary is from Katie Jane Garside's "Roadkill."**

**Not much to say, except that I don't like titles with commas in them & I hope you enjoyed this despite the comma. I wouldn't have. I hope everyone at least tries light as a feather stiff as a board when they're a kid.**


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